Space Opera refers to works set in a spacefaring civilization, usually, though not always, set in the future, specifically the far future. Technology is ubiquitous and secondary to the story. Space opera has an epic character to it: the universe is big, there are usually many sprawling civilizations and empires, there are political conflicts and intrigue. The action will range part of a solar system, at least, and possibly a whole galaxy or more than one. It frequently takes place in a Standard Sci Fi Setting. It has a romantic element which distinguishes it from most Hard Science Fiction: big love stories, epic space battles, oversized heroes and villains, awe-inspiring scenery, and insanely gorgeous men and women.

Note that this is quite different from the original definition of space opera, which was originally a derogatory term, following "horse opera" (cheap westerns) and "Soap Opera" (so named because soap operas began as hour-long ads for soap), which requires no explanation. The phrase was coined in 1941 by Wilson Tucker to describe what he called "the hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn space-ship yarn". (It's said that before 1975 or so, the only author who ever intentionally set out to write a space opera was Jack Vance, who wrote a novel, Space Opera, literally about an opera company in space.)

Via semantic drift, well-regarded works such as the Lensman series are today held up as prime examples of Space Opera. As more authors and writers came to embrace the style, the term came to lose many of its negative connotations. Assisting that process were writers who regarded all tales of action and adventure in space as bad, and so tried to pejoratively label it all "space opera"; they succeeded with the label, but not with keeping it pejorative.

Star Wars is inarguably the most famous modern example of space opera. (Indeed, The Empire Strikes Back may have shifted "space opera" from insult to a more neutral genre descriptor, due to the involvement of veteran sf writer Leigh Brackett.) In Star Wars, technology is either magic (the Force) or jazzier versions of today's gadgets (blaster rifles, hovercars, space ships). Any Star Wars character (evil emperor, farmboy, princess) would feel at home in a thick fantasy novel, in part because editor-publisher Lester del Rey derived the "epic fantasy" template partly from Star Wars and partly from The Lord of the Rings, though also because these works borrow from the same source of Jungian imagery.

The genre is useful for long story and character arcs but also expensive to film, unless rendered in animated form, like countless anime series.

Examples

Dragon Ball gradually worked its way into this, starting with Dragon Ball Z. Though the series initially concentrated on Earth-based stories, the Saiyan Saga was where things began to exhibit a more galactic scope. It does mostly stay back on Earth after Frieza's defeat, though.

Space Battleship Yamato, the first space opera anime and among the first space operas to use large scale battles between fleets of spacecraft. Among the first space operas to involve the legend Leiji Matsumoto.

Starship Operators, notable for its extreme realism, one of the hardest space operas out there.

Vandread: Humanity has split into two factions: Men and Women, who are continually at war with each other. Our story starts with a shipful of women and three guys, all thrown together and having to cooperate to stay alive. As a metaphor, the technology of the two factions combines together to become far greater than the sum of the parts, barely keeping them alive and fueling the story line.

Judge Dredd: Though mainly set in a DystopianWretched Hive on Earth, several stories (especially The Judge Child Quest) have seen Dredd traverse space and visit many different alien civilizations, both friendly and hostile.

Buck Rogers and its imitator Flash Gordon are the Trope Codifiers, though the former began as an After the End story and only moved into space and the latter originally stayed on the planet Mongo, where Flash, Dale Arden and Dr. Zarkoff have gotten stranded. (The story takes place in the present day.). However, the popular image and later iterations of the strip have Flash Gordon adventuring in space. Star Wars began after Lucas failed to obtain the rights to Flash. King Features, realizing their mistake, made the Flash Gordon film after the wild success of Star Wars.

Captain EO, a Disney Theme Parks 3-D movie, is less than 20 minutes long but clearly takes place in this genre: A dashing hero with a crew of misfit alien creatures is sent on a mission to transform a grim, H.R. Giger-esque planet. There's a skirmish with the evil Supreme Commander's fleet of starships, and later the heroes are taken captive by her forces — but they use The Power of Rock to turn into it a land of Crystal Spires and Togas and its people (including the ruler) into happy, Day-Glo dancers.

Star Wars is perhaps the most famous modern example (as noted in the main description), with its grand and fantastical tale of heroic rebels fighting against the evil Empire set "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."

The Culture books by Iain M. Banks, although again it does have a society changed by technology - in particular near-perfect medicine and a lack of the need for money due to massive technological advances.

John Maddox Roberts' Space Angel has larger-than-life characters, epic space battles, exotic worlds, and an alien species that inhabits the cores of galaxies. Not a planet in the core of a galaxy, mind you - the whole core.

Lucifers Star is a dark space opera story about how the Red Baron-esque pilot of a Feudal Future nation discovers his side was gasp the bad guys in a war and has to deal with the consequences.

Live Action TV

Andromeda: Originally pitched by Majel Roddenberry and steered by Robert Hewitt Wolfe. In Season Three the network pushed for a more episodic show with more focus on Kevin Sorbo's character. It was a Vancouver production and it shows: you'll see the ensemble recycled in other Canadian productions from that era: SG-1, Lexx, etc. The last year (Hercules: The Legendary Space Journeys) was terrible. These days, it is best remembered for Lexa Doig in tight outfits. Can't blame Michael Shanks for knocking her up, though it did remove her from the show for a while. ("Sturdy.")

Babylon 5: A sort of "five-year miniseries" which rewards multiple viewings. It is essentially a longer and more coherent Star Trek: Enterprise seven years early (though it was actually inspired by Tolkien): alien races put aside their differences to fight a common enemy, resulting in a new federation. It is a little more cyberpunk than the shows listed here, and isn't afraid to portray Earth in an unflattering light.

The spinoff, Crusade, suffered from frequent network meddling and budget restrictions, and isn't worth the time unless you're a genuine fan. The second spinoff, Legend of the Rangers (LOTR...geddit?), is pretty much the Babylon 5 Christmas Special: 15 minutes of G'kar (one of Andreas Katulas' final performances before he died!) and an hour and 45 minutes of wasted time.

Galactica 1980 was geared more towards children, and rather stupid ones at that.

Ron Moore's ambitious spin-off series, Caprica, had positive critical reviews, but it suffered from the same fate all prequels do: A central tension between the new characters (who do not appear or get mentioned in the later saga) and the predecessors to the originals (whose fate is already known to us). A second prequel series, set during the First Cylon War (Blood & Chrome) was pretty much all-action, with none of the gravitas/nuance viewers had come to expect from the BSG brand.

Although Doctor Who is not Space Opera in itself, some individual stories make use of the subgenere.

"Mission to the Unknown" and the epic twelve part "The Daleks' Master Plan". Oddly, "Mission to the Unknown", the prelude episode feels like an Unbuilt Trope version of the sort of stories Star Trek popularised. "Mission to the Unknown" has the Space agent Marc Cory discovering the Dalek plot to invade Earth's solar system but dies before he can even send a message of warning. Earth's central government, which encompasses the whole system also has a subtly dystopian feel to it.

"The Space Pirates"

"Frontier In Space" and "Planet of the Daleks", which taken together form a twelve part story like the earlier The Daleks' Master Plan, though of a very different kind.

"Earthshock".

Earth: Final Conflict: Another botched series from Roddenberry. The lead actor was run off the show because the studio felt that it needed to be more episodic. The tone of the show changed from a sci-fi detective story ("Who are the Taelons and what do they want in exchange for improving Earth") to a cop show with very few sci-fi concepts beyond those already established.

Farscape: The sci-fi equivalent of Marmite. It starts off relatively tame, but then the show stops pulling punches and shows how savage and alien the universe can be. The puppets are mostly well done, and the show has a very grim atmosphere to it. It is also unafraid to resort to fanservice, Dutch angles, and Large Ham actors to spice up a lukewarm script. (As happened often.)

Firefly, which has the unusual distinction of being both a Space Operaand aHorse Opera. However, Firefly is only a borderline Space Opera, as it has no aliens and according to Word of God is set in a universe with no faster-than-light travel (although this is difficult to reconcile with some of the on-screen events).

Power Rangers in Space had begun to to drift this way before the season ended. The Rangers spent more and more time in space fighting evil or trying to rescue Zordon, and the villains were slightly more fleshed out than usual, with the apparent main villain being the franchise's first case of Luke, I Am Your Father.

Power Rangers Lost Galaxy followed suit, depicting a human colony ship's season-long journey to a new world. Along the way the Rangers deal with Space Pirates, a ruthless Anti-Hero with a tragic past who ends up sacrificing himself, and the (temporary) death of one of their own.

Lexx: One of the crewmembers is an escaped sex slave. The ship is a literal dildo. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Star Trek, perhaps the most famous example in television, with its grand tales of interstellar exploration, romance, intrigue, and war. Though there is (some) serious consideration of how technology and science would change society (not surprising, given that creator Gene Roddenberry originally envisioned using the setting to address social issues that could not have been dealt with in a normal drama back in the 60s). Coincidentally, there was in fact a Star Trek Opera performed on stage in New York.

The Stargate-verse is a borderline example. Technically the center-of-operations is on a single planet (Earth in Stargate SG-1, the Atlantis base in Stargate Atlantis), but with the instant wormholes provided by the Stargate, the bases function like a spaceship or space station in a standard Space Opera, as far as most story purposes go. Both series also have the Big Universe, Big Empires, Big Heroes, and Big Villains elements in spades, and it gets bigger yet once Earth has a space fleet. However, many individual episodes, especially in early seasons, feel more like Planetary Romance. Stargate Universe, the second spin-off, is probably closer to a traditional Space Opera.

The forgotten board game Imperium was used as a source for some of the Traveller universe. In it, a young and expansionist republic on earth, conquers a Vestigial Empire in space. There are a number of other Space Opera board wargames, but this one is notable for historical reasons.

Rifts has the Three Galaxies setting, a Space Opera with the same blend of magic, technology, and plain weirdness as the main setting. As may be expected, it's way way down on the hardness scale, but it has pretty much all the elements of the Standard Sci Fi Setting.

Rocket Age only covers our solar system but the epic themes and intrigues of space opera are definitely there. Just replace The Empire with actual Nazis.

There was a RPG namedSpace Opera.

Pacesetter's 1980s Star Ace RPG, in the spirit of ''Star Wars', but set in an original universe with fewer mystical undertones.

Traveller was the first RPG set in the Space Opera genre, and set the standard for those that followed. It's in the harder end of Space Opera and a lot of work went into the Backstory including fairly realistic science and social science. Traveller is flexible enough that a wide variety of flavors of Space Opera can be played, since the setting is one designed for the telling of stories.

Warhammer 40,000 is overloaded Up to Eleven with adventure, battles, intrigue, and fantasy (including Space Elves, Orks, and even Gods), all in a setting where mankind possesses a galaxy-spanning empire with planet-spanning cities and a population in the trillions. However it's also overloaded with about as much cynicism, grimness, and darkness as you can get (hence the common description "grimdark").

Video Games

Many a science fiction TBSG (turn based strategy game) - most prominently Master of Orion II

Advent Rising: You play as the Sole Survivor of a human world that has been destroyed by aliens. Another alien race takes pity on him and helps him develop his latent psychic potential to basically become a demigod and take the fight back to those other aliens who destroyed his homerworld, getting involved in epic space battles all throughout.

Asura's Wrath has some of this. It's mixed with South Asian Mythology.

The Mass Effect series could be seen as putting the Opera back into Space Operas, with lavish and often dreamy environments, exotic cultures, and tales of great personal tragedy. At the same time, it ranks suprisingly high on the Scale Of Science Fiction Hardness, is quite serious in tone, and takes place in the relatively near future (2180s to be precise). Like many other newer Space Operas, it also has Lovecraft Lite elements thanks to the series' main antagonists, the Reapers.

Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic can be seen as a spiritual predecessor to Mass Effect: you play as a Badass Crew of a Cool Starship sent to a remote star system to deal with enigmatic space raiders who keep attacking civilian freighters. Along the way, you may get into space dogfights, explore strange planets in an all-terrain vehicle, and blast away enemies on-foot with lasers and other futuristic guns.

The Wing Commander franchise, which was conceived by its creator Chris Roberts as being "World War II in space". It also has elements of Top Gun as well (with main character Christopher Blair's [canon] callsigh "Maverick" being a direct shout out).

Chris Roberts' current project, the MMO game Star Citizen is also an example. Furthermore, it has been conceived as a persistent online universe that's constantly evolving. In addition, there's also its single player campaign "Squadron 42", described as a Spiritual Successor to the above mentioned Wing Commander franchise.

Nat One Productions has the Denazra story-line, where the protagonists are members of an interstellar Marshall service tasked with catching intergalactic political refugees and criminals. Then the titular machines show up...

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